Cather Studies, Volume 9: Willa Cather and Modern Cultures

12. “The Cruelty of Physical Things”: Picture Writing and Violence in Willa Cather’s “The Profile”

244 12 “The Cruelty of Physical Things” Picture Writing and Violence in Willa Cather’s “The Profile” J O Y C E K E S S L E R Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself. —Cather, “The Novel Démeublé” As one of her earliest works of fiction, Willa Cather’s “The Profile” reveals a great deal about what later became the consistent use of visual imagery and visual art reference in her work. This essay examines the visual semiotics in “The Profile,” assessing Cather’s knowledge of modern art discourses in relation to her participation in modernist cultural production. “The Profile” can be seen as a product of her interest in and understanding of the modernist experiment in relation to the neoclassic , romantic, and realist art movements. This particular change narrative of art values in conflict was one with which Cather, during her college years of writing art reviews, had become quite 245 “The Cruelty of Physical Things” familiar, and she exploited it as a suggestive cultural setting for her disturbing tale of the brief marriage between a sensitive portrait painter and his visibly scarred wife. Even this early in her development as a writer, Cather deftly employed visual images and the critical discussion surrounding them in her narrative of the social inequities suffered by women of America and western Europe in the transition from the nineteenth century to the twentieth. In portraying the struggle between Aaron Dunlap and Virginia Gilbert over the significance of the latter’s facial scar, “The Pro- file” displays the principal visual strategy that Cather notably and consistently employed throughout her writing career. Borrowing her phrase from My Ántonia, I identify this strategy as her “picture writing” (p. 237). Included in picture writing, as I am using the term, is her skillful use of the cultural narratives attached to well-known art images, such as the critical furor occasioned by Manet’s Olympia, mentioned briefly but with intention in this early short work of fiction. The scope of Cather’s picture writing, however, takes in her image making generally, and is dependent not just on her knowledge of art movements and their ideals but also on her understanding and use of visual semiosis—of the ways in which objects and materials, colors, marks, and forms all are used in the production of meaning. It was this profound understanding of the visual that she possessed and confidently drew upon, even in the early years of her career. Since the mid-1990s, Cather’s use of the visual in her fiction has become a focus of interest among students of her work. Polly Duryea’s exhaustive “Catalogue Raisonné” traces Cather’s exposure to the world of images during her college years of extensive critical engagement with exhibits including the French and American impressionists and documents Cather’s experience with artists, such as Manet, who departed radically from the romantic and realist traditions (Duryea 6). In “The Observant Eye, the Art of Illustration, and Willa Cather’s My Ántonia,” Janis P. Stout points out Cather’s frequent creation of an additional vi- 246 joyce kessler sual layer for the pursuit of truth that escapes the written word. For Stout, Cather’s close involvement in the choice of illustrator for earlier editions of My Ántonia and her increasing reliance on “visual experience itself” are evidence of a highly developed visual acuity. In her introduction to Willa Cather and Material Culture, Stout argues that Cather’s embrace of the material culture of her narrative subjects locates her work firmly within the modernist scope (10–11). Catherine Morley also notes the developing importance of the symbol throughout Cather’s career in “Voice of the Prairies? Willa Cather and the International Modernist Scene” (9). These similarities of insight assume a paradigm of relationships among images, symbols, and words in a literary text that this essay seeks to revise. The general accord indicates, however, the trend of the ongoing discussion about Cather’s visuality, its relationship to...